


oh, you're gonna be my bruise

by etherealogie (library_lungs)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, star wars the last jedi
Genre: Ben Solo Pain Train, F/M, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, episode 9 speculation kind of but not really, i love to suffer, yall ready for some angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-02-20 15:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 7,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13149747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/library_lungs/pseuds/etherealogie
Summary: They've fallen into orbit, never touching.Post-TLJ oneshots. Title taken from The Word of Your Body by Duncan Sheik.





	1. doorways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's like a wound.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> And All That Could Have Been -- Nine Inch Nails

He can still feel it at the back of his mind. It is both like and unlike a doorway.

Most of the time, it’s large and cold, durasteel that wouldn’t open no matter how he pounded and raged. Not that he’s tried that. Not that he will. Sometimes, though, he does lay his hand on it, the same hand that touched hers. The hand that lied to her about his future. Beneath his glove, it still burns with the memory of her skin.

It looks like the door to the Falcon, but he tries not to think about that too much. 

Other times–less frequently, but it does happen–it’s more like a curtain. Black and gauzy, sheer and soft as her hair, stirred by a cold island wind. If he peers hard enough, he can see stars wheeling beyond, the light years between them. He wonders if its too far to reach, even if he was brave enough to try. 

In these ways, the bond is a doorway. But unlike a doorway, he has no idea if it would open, and if it would lead to anything even if it did. 

He has many memories of her eyes, now, but the most prominent one is still the last time he saw her, when she shut the door. When they were hard and stern and terribly sad, too far away for him to pick out the green specks in the deep brown. Try as he might to think of her eyes in other ways–soft and hopeful in the elevator, wide and wondering when their hands touched, even dark and determined as she forced her way into his head so long ago–that last look is the one he can’t shake. The one that haunts him.

Supreme Leader Kylo Ren appears to be sleeping, but he’s not. He’s trekking to the back of his mind, to see what that doorway-that-is-not-a-doorway looks like tonight.

It’s a curtain. It billows back and forth, only the barest barrier between him and whatever lays beyond. There is no cold metal to press his hand against, nothing to provide a counterpoint to the burning in his palm. If he pressed against that curtain, his hand would go through, and he would fall. Fall into whatever was left.

_I saw your future, Ben._

A slight breeze stirs the curtain. It smells like sun and skin and rain in a cupped palm. 

His voice is climbing up his throat before he has the conscious thought to speak. But then again, her name seems as much a part of him as the breath in his lungs. It takes more effort to stay silent than to speak it.

“Rey?”

A moment, swelling to a silent crescendo. The stars beyond the curtain wheel in wild gyres, in sadness or excitement or dread, he can’t tell. He waits. He peels off his gloves.

“…Ben?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So these are kinda connected by an overarching plot, but still mostly function as oneshots. Be prepared for lots of angst.


	2. sabers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey is trying to build a lightsaber. The man in her head is making it difficult.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> The Sound -- Noah Gundersen

The pieces clatter to the floor around her, silver and black, infuriatingly small and still unconnected. Rey sighs, hands tensing on her thighs. His presence is a palpable thing, even though he hasn’t physically manifested since she shut the door on him in Crait. She can still feel him, still and silent. Watching. “What do you want?”

_For you leave me alone, for one thing._

“That makes two of us.”

_You don’t have to talk out loud, you know. I can hear you._

Her hands curl into fists. Damn her if she’ll speak mind to mind with Ben S–

 _Don’t._ The word comes hard and and curt, chased with the sounds of a crackling saber and the smell of melting armor. A smell she remembers from the throne room. 

The steel slips out of her spine, the last of her concentration melting away. Here, so attuned to the Force, his feelings are close as her own. He doesn’t want to hear that name from her, aloud or in her brain.

“If you don’t want to hear it, I have a solution.” She sits up straight, baring her teeth. “Get out of my head.”

 

The repetition is purposeful, the words she spat at him while strapped to an interrogation chair, when they pushed too far into each other’s minds and became hopelessly, inextricably tangled. 

He doesn’t respond, but she feels him retreat, her words driving him as far from her as he’s able to go. She shouldn’t be sad about it. It’s what she wanted. 

But as Rey closes her eyes and feels the pieces of her hilt floating in front of her, she can’t shake the feeling of emptiness in her middle. 

—

_You’re doing it wrong._

Rey glares at the half-constructed hilt in front of her. Nothing about it feels right, but she’s ignoring that. She’s spent far too long in the cave and needs the damn thing done. “I’d really rather not do this now.”

Too late, she realizes what she’s said, what came after those words the last time she said them to this man. Unbidden, her head whips to the side, the hilt falling to the floor. 

She can see him, just barely. Only the outline of broad shoulders, his prominent nose, messy black hair. He looks even more tired than he had last time, deep shadows around dark eyes.

He’s fully clothed, this time, but the ghost of a smirk plays around the corner of his lips. 

_Quit glaring at it._ He raises a brow, the image of him growing more and more solid. Rey doesn’t know how to stop it, and doesn’t know if she wants to. _Close your eyes. Find the Force. Let the vision of it form on its own, instead of just envisioning what you want it to look like._

She glares at him for a moment longer, now almost as solid as she is. If he notices, he doesn’t comment. Just stares at her, full lips pursed, before darting a glance at the hilt and nodding. _Go on, then._

With a sigh, Rey turns back to the saber. She closes her eyes. “Forgive me if I’m somewhat hesitant to take your advice on saber construction. Yours is less than ideal.” There’s no vitriol behind the words. 

She hears him snort. 

—

She can tell when it’s done. The connection to the Force ceases to crackle like a live wire, instead slowly sinking back into her surroundings, a current she can feel but can no longer see.

It takes her a moment to open her eyes. Fear and anticipation and something like sorrow writhe in her gut, and she doesn’t let herself examine them too closely. 

The hilt floats in front of her, more black than silver. The switch is exactly in the middle.

Rey takes a deep breath and reaches out. For a moment, she’s back on the island, hand being tickled by a long blade of grass. A smile touches her lips as her fingers close around the metal, warm to the touch.

She can feel him, but she can’t see him. She’s making no effort to hide her thoughts–she knows he sees the memory. Sees the island. She can feel something dark and sad and complicated tensing his muscles. She can feel him watching her. 

Instead of looking at the saber in her hand, she looks beyond, peering into the shadows of the cave. He slowly comes into view, as if the darkness is bleeding off of him, revealing him to the light. Her stomach twists.

A soft smile curves his mouth, but his eyes are dark. Pained. She can feel them tracing her face, and it makes her throat hurt, makes the hand holding her saber tremble. 

_Nice job, Rey._

She tries to twist her lips into a grin, but they’re trembling too much. _Thanks, Ben._

He doesn’t respond. He turns, fades away.

Rey presses the switch. Twin blades sprout from either end of the hilt of her new saber, bathing her face in violet light.


	3. tears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The General is gone.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> Weathered -- The Dangerous Summer

Rey can count the people who have seen her cry on one hand. Finn, when Han died. Chewie, the same. Luke, though she doesn’t know if tears of frustration should actually count.

And Ben.

But that was before she was the last Jedi. Before she was thrust into a leadership role she feels woefully unquipped for, all because of a rising power in her veins that’s awakened and ripped her from desert to island to fire and salt. Her heart has grown and broken and mended and broken again, and everyone feels entitled to a piece of her—her power, her time, her tears.

So before the General’s funeral, she gets out all her crying in her room. The reaction to her dry eyes will be divided—some will see it as a kind of blasphemy, others as a sign of Jedi stoicism that Rey has so far shown none of. She can’t bring herself to give a fuck.

Its like that, hunched over and sobbing to scrape her throat bloody, that she feels him. And there’s a moment of wondering if she should stop, if she should try to calm the storm of emotion wringing her out, but why bother? Ben’s already seen her cry.

He approaches slowly, like she’s a mouse he doesn’t want to startle away. She feels the bed shift as he settles on the other end, large and hulking, shoulders bowed in as if overwhelmed by the weight they carry. He’s warm, always warm, strange for a man who looks so dark and cold, and she can feel it like a beacon.

Rey doesn’t think too hard, and in the space of one sob and another, she’s turned toward him, buried her face in the nape of his neck, one of the only places not covered by dark fabric.

He hestitates before his hands come up around her back, resting lightly as if anticipating being shoved away. When it’s clear she won’t, they wrap around her, pull her to him. She doesn’t know if the shudder comes from him or her, but she feels something wet in her hair.

When she’s wrung out, she looks up. His lip trembles, on the cusp of words he won’t say. Never does say, no matter how many times they’ve found themselves in the same room and galaxies away. The words between them grow heavier each time, weighting the air, and she wonders when they’ll finally suffocate.

Rey reaches up, touches his cheek. He fades away.

She tilts her palm and watches Ben Solo’s tears roll down her lifeline, hit the floor


	4. touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An inconvenient time for a Force bond moment.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> It Will Come Back -- Hozier

He concentrates on uncurling his fist, one finger at a time. A year ago, he would have wrecked a console in a storm of crackling red light, screaming until his throat was raw and his fingers cramped around his saber hilt. Such behavior doesn't seem fitting for the Supreme Leader. Especially considering he couldn't tell anyone what brought on the incident.

He shouldn't have turned around. Shouldn't have looked. As soon as he felt that tug, the Force pulling their disparate pieces together to meet in the middle as ambient noise faded away, he knew what he would find. He knew she wasn't alone. He heard a breathy sigh, heard the mumble of pleasant words against her throat, the shift of fingers through her hair.

But Kylo was a masochist, and he turned around anyway, and his eyes met hers just as her lips met someone else's.

The worst part? He didn't sever the connection. Didn't even try. Just stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists, grinding his teeth so hard they might crack, staring into her open eyes as she kissed that kriffing pilot. They were of a height, Rey and Poe, and she had only to tilt her eyes upward to see Kylo, to feel the full weight of his regard.

She didn't look away. She didn't close her eyes. She also didn't stop.

His breathing is finally starting to regulate when he feels it again, a feeling of being wrenched from one place to another even though he's standing still. There's no other sound, nothing but her breathing, deceptively even. He tenses, waiting for the shouting, the admonishment. It doesn't come, but the silence is too heavy to leave.

"Didn't mean to interrupt your afterglow."

"Don't be fucking vulgar."

Despite himself, the corner of his lip twitches up, because such a response is both so _her_ and so unexpected. Rey is shoot first, ask questions later, all fire and passion that lights up and burns out like a solar flare. Her decisions come hard and fast, made with her gut instead of her head, but regret isn't something she dances with. As someone bound and gagged by incessant doubt, Kylo appreciates how Rey dives in headlong without ever waiting around in the shallows. 

"Best pilot in the Resistance, huh? Is he the best--"

" _Vulgar_ , Ben."

His shoulders tense, and the half-formed smile falls away from his face. "Don't." That name from her is still too much. He's told her that before, even if it wasn't in so many words. He told her in the cave, as she fashioned the lightsaber now clipped to her belt. 

Her belt. The one that's still on, along with the rest of her clothes. Some of the tension bleeds from his shoulders. 

"I won't call you Ben if you won't drop in on my..."

"Your _what_?"

Her cheeks blaze, making freckles stand out in sharp relief against her tanned skin. "Meetings," she finally mumbles.

A sharp snort bursts from his mouth. 

She frowns up at him, taking a step forward so only a hand's breadth separates her chest from his. Kylo breathes in with the weighted awareness that the air in his mouth was in hers first. 

"I didn't do it on purpose," he says, and he doesn't mean for his voice to sound as small as it does, as soft as it comes out. It's always like that, with her. Even before _this_ , when they were just enemies on opposite sides of a war, before it all became so tangled, his voice was always soft with her. For a brief, burning moment, he misses the mask. "You of all people should know that. You can't control it, either."

"So you're telling me there's a possibility I might stumble in on you kissing someone, too?"

His eyes don't drop from hers. He reads the layers of her question, as many-grained as sand in the desert. "No," he replies, even softer.

She searches his face for a moment, lips parted, hearing his answer and reading its meaning. 

"You won't, again," she says, and he reads the unspoken words behind that, too. He ponders, for a moment, the way that all of their conversations seem to happen in layers--what their mouths will and won't say, and what their faces reveal, things they might not be able to put into words even if they were willing to.

He breaks the moment when it becomes too much, stepping back as ambient noise starts to filter back into the space between them. "Guess he's not the best lay in the Resistance, then."

"I wouldn't know," Rey snaps.

"Are you going to find out?"

"You know I'm not," she growls. The sound of it makes the back of his neck prickle. His hand rises almost of its own accord, large enough to cover her cheek, for his fingers to scrape her scalp as his thumb brushes over her lips, still swollen with the pressure of another man's kiss.

"Good," he snarls, right as the connection blinks out.


	5. sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He always talks in his sleep, but this one seems different.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> Wake Me Up, I'm Drowning -- Noah Gundersen

Rey has almost grown used to hearing him at night. Something about the shared vulnerability of sleep makes the connection easier to open, and it falls away like a blanket off her shoulder, baring his mind to hers. Usually, he shows up on the floor. Twice, in her bed. She never makes him move, whichever one it ends up being, and they never touch, though she knows he feels her there, that the opening of the bond makes itself known to him, too.

He talks in his sleep. Usually nonsense, sometimes funny, generally just annoying. The first time the bond opened on him sleeping, a gigantic pile of man on her floor, she wondered if she should be listening for him to mutter about battle plans or First Order bases, something useful she could report on. But then, she didn't know how she would explain the knowledge. 

She still hadn't told anyone about... _this_. She was starting to think she never would. And part of her knew that even if he gave her something to work with, if it had the potential to hurt him, she wouldn't tell. She knew this, and part of her hated it.

None of Ben's nighttime mutterings were anything important, anyway. The most coherent thing she'd ever heard from him was something about his shoes, and he couldn't find them, and why was the 9E unit trying to wear them, it didn't have kriffing feet.

He's there, right next to her bed, close enough that she could reach out and touch him if she wanted. Something about it is off, though. The pattern of his breathing changed and woke her up, coming hard and fast instead of long and even. It stops, and she hears a long, low moan, a sound of deep dread and regret and a host of other dark emotions that make the hair on her arms stand up.

She's swinging her legs over her bed before she thinks twice about it, her foot hitting his bare shoulder. He sleeps shirtless, and every time she sees it, it's just as jarring as the first time, when he gave her that piece of advice about letting the past die that he's so far been woefully unable to accept himself. She drops to her knees beside him as another low keen comes through his clenched teeth, rising in volume. Her palm itches to clap over his mouth, to hiss at him to be quiet, but no one else can hear him, can they? He's not really here.

Rey's hand still rises, still settles on his shoulder. He curls into her touch, and another sound breaks the silence of the Force connection. A sob.

It's too much. "Ben." She shakes his shoulder, tugs at his hair. " _Ben_."

Dark eyes fly open, damp and haunted. She's suddenly aware of her own state of undress, a thin tunic with nothing underneath, but his eyes stay on her face, and he doesn't even snarl at her for using _that_ name. 

"What the kriff is wrong with you?" She asks, but the harsh words are belied by her tone, by the way she pushes his sweaty hair from his forehead.

His eyes flutter closed, just for a moment, letting her touch him. But then he's sitting up, gently but firmly pushing her hand away. Her fingers curl in on themselves, a fist she hides in her lap.

"I'm fine." Ben takes a deep breath. It breaks on the end.

"Like hell."

He summons a single snort.

"Tell me what's the matter."

His gaze falls to the floor, his hands speak of trepidation as they shake, push his hair away, a nervous tick she's started to recognize when he's uncomfortable. For a moment, she thinks he's going to refuse, reads his reluctance to speak in the lines of his shoulders. But the line softens, and when his voice comes out, it's barely a whisper. "There was an attack," he says quietly. "A village on Takodana. Close to where we met."

 _Met._ Something about that doesn't feel right, but she can't put her finger on it. Maybe its in the way she feels like they never truly _met_ , that instead of meeting they just suddenly recognized the other. But she doesn't say anything about that. "Us?" Her brow creases. "As far as I know, no units--"

"Not you," Ben says softly. His hands are trembling again. 

Rey sinks into a cross-legged seat on the floor. "Oh," she responds, because she doesn't know what else to say.

"I didn't give the order," Ben says, words rushing out of him, as if he's afraid they'll dissipate if he dams them up now. "Hux heard of some weapons cache there, and dispatched a unit without asking. And they..." his throat works, swallowing. He doesn't finish.

A bead of icy sweat runs down Rey's back. "All of them?"

He nods. His teeth clench around another broken sound. "My fault. I put Hux in charge of the military. He's a rabid cur, just like the Supreme Leader said, and I--" he stops midsentence, eyes widening at the title. _His_ title, though he wasn't referring to himself. 

Rey doesn't know how to reconcile any of it. She doesn't try. She sits on her cold floor with the new Supreme Leader and, not for the first time, wonders how the hell she's going to live with this. How the hell either of them are going to make it out of this.

He takes a deep breath, eyes rising to hers. "Tell them," he says shortly. "Any other village with a cache, move it. He's intercepted some kind of communication, he has a list of places to look. I'd move all of them, just to be safe."

She nods. "I will." A million other words filter through her mind, but none of them make it to her mouth. Angry retorts, questions about why he doesn't just kill Hux, admonishments to herself that killing him isn't the Jedi way, the declaration that she doesn't give a fuck about the Jedi way. She wants to scream at Ben, shake his shoulders and ask why he doesn't end this, why he doesn't change this, why he doesn't come home. 

Ben nods, in turn. "Sorry I woke you up," he mutters.

She doesn't respond, maintaining eye contact as he slowly fades away, leaving her cold and alone on the floor. She sits there a moment before she rises and puts on pants, already fabricating a way to tell Connix about the weapons caches that doesn't mention the Force or the Supreme Leader.


	6. crown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben isn't good a lying, and his crown looks ridiculous.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> If I Had A Heart -- Fever Ray 
> 
> (PS thank you to everyone who's left comments and kudos! I'm glad you're enjoying it!)

“We have an informant.”

Rey’s lip breaks underneath her teeth, an unpleasant coppery taste spreading over her tongue. She can still see Connix’s lips moving, see Poe nodding along, Finn’s arms cross and Rose’s brow furrow at whatever Kaydel is saying. But the noise of their voices is lost to the void of the Force bond, and the voice she’s hearing now is much less pleasant. 

“All of the other locations were empty. Every single one.” Hux always sounds like he’s just smelled the galaxy’s ass. Rey can’t see him—only Ben, always only Ben—but she can picture his face, lips pulled back in a sneer, the angle of his chin just high enough to show that he doesn’t care that the man he’s addressing is the Supreme Leader. 

“Sounds like your intel was less than credulous, then.” On the surface, Ben sounds bored, but the undercurrent of worry is there, and Rey knows she’s probably the only one who could pick it out of the current. She steals a glance to her left, scratching her neck to give the illusion of nonchalance. 

Ben sits on some kind of throne, though it looks different than the one Snoke used. For some reason, that’s reassuring. The sheen on Ben’s face is tinted silvery blue instead of crimson. He’s not using the throne room. He still wears all black, his body swathed in folds of fabric that remind her of mourning clothes. The only difference is the thin silver circlet in his dark hair, bisecting the scar she gave him. 

_A crown?_ She can’t stop the thought, or the way her eyebrow climbs up her forehead. 

Ben doesn’t respond, but she sees the corner of his lip lift, and some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. Good. He looks so tense when he lies.

“My intel came straight from the source,” the unpleasant voice replies. “Someone told them.”

“I find that hard to believe.” From the corner of her eye, she sees Ben sit back in his not-quite-throne, fingers drumming on his thigh. She hopes Hux doesn’t know that’s a nervous tick of his, like chewing on his lip or messing with his hair. “More than likely they just intercepted one of our own communications.”

“Impossible. My army is too well-trained to let such things slip.”

“Under Phasma, maybe. She never commanded much loyalty, but they feared her. You…” Ben shrugs. “There’s not much to fear there, I’m afraid. General Hugs.”

 _Pushing it_ , she warns him, even as a choked snorting noise bubbles up from her throat. Rose gives her a brief, worried look, and Rey waves her hand, covering her mouth in a faux cough. 

Silence on the other end of the bond. Ben’s fingers stop drumming.

“It’s clear that the caches were there,” Hux says finally, his voice a low poison. It makes a shiver roll through Rey’s shoulder blades, even dampened as it is by the crushing silence of the Force bond. “The villages will still be punished. If we allow—“

Ben’s hand moves in a blur of darkness, and Rey can’t stop her head from whipping to the side, her own fingers tensing on her legs, reaching for her saber. She can’t do anything to help him, divided by endless star systems, but the reaction is instinct. 

His fingers clench, and Hux makes a strangled sound. Ben’s teeth flash, a feral rictus that isn’t quite a smile but terrifyingly close.

“You will pull all troops out of those villages,” he says, his voice low and menacing and somehow still pleasant. It reminds her of the snowy forest, what feels like eons ago. It’s just us now. Something you’d murmur to a lover, not an enemy. Her lips twist. That line has never been clear with them, has it?

For a moment, she wonders if he’s implanting the idea in Hux’s mind, insuring his obedience with the Force. But the sound of protest she hears doesn’t make it seem that way. “Supreme Leader,” Hux snarls, and the title sounds like an epithet. “Surely you don’t intend to let them continue—“

“Surely I don’t intend to let you question me.” The tone of Ben’s voice makes the hair stand up on the back of her neck and warmth pool in her middle at the same time. Rey shifts uncomfortably.

His hand releases, the same motion one would use when throwing something particularly unpleasant into the trash compacter. “Pull them out,” he says shortly, sitting back. That silver-blue light glints off his strange durasteel crown. “That’s an order.”

A tense moment of silence. “Yes, Supreme Leader.” Footsteps echo down cold metal hallways.

Ben waits until they fade completely before turning to her. He looks like nerf shit, dark circles around his eyes, shoulders bent in as if he might fall asleep at any moment. His scar is more prominent in this silver light, face pale and drawn and bone-achingly exhausted. His hair is wild around that ridiculous crown.

He hears that thought, and gives her another wan smile. _Needed something. Beats the mask._

“Rey?”

Just like that, the connection severs, ambient noise and her friend’s voices bleeding in where only silence and Ben’s breathing had been. Rey turns, pasting a smile on her face. Finn and Rose look worried, Kaydel and Poe just confused. 

“You okay?” Finn leans forward, pushing a glass of water toward her. “You kinda…zoned out, I guess.”

“For like five minutes,” Poe adds. He flashes her a winning grin. “Imagining something?”

Across the table, Kaydel rolls her eyes. Rose snorts. All of them know by now they’d kissed, and that they never intended to do it again. Much good-natured ribbing ensued.

Rey snorts and downs the water. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Haven’t slept well the past few nights.”


	7. dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How it should have gone.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> Hurts Like Hell -- Fleurie

He can tell it's a dream because of the foggy edges of the room, the way his limbs swim languidly through the air, and the strange quality of the light--both harsh and soft at once, flaring and fading in unfamiliar ways. And because of the lightsaber in his hand.

It shifts into all manner of possible colors and shapes as he holds it in a ready stance, up by his face, staring down the ever-changing blade at the Praetorians surrounding him. Crossguard, no crossguard, double-bladed, red and blue and purple and white, a chameleon weapon that still feels solid and real under his hand, as if every iteration of this lightsaber is the true one. 

His gaze slides to the side, to Rey, fighting a lone guard while he holds off three. A slash, slow and syrupy in the dream-light, and a wound appears on her arm. The ghosts of emotions roil through him--worry, fury. Something warmer, something that revels in the sight of her savagery, that thrills to the sound of her growl.

In the way of dreams, now he's no longer holding the guards off. One is holding him, a staff pressed against his windpipe, and his shifting lightsaber is nowhere to be found. His teeth grit into a snarl, his arms shake with the effort of keeping the weapon at bay.

"Ben!"

The saber she tosses through the air shifts just as his did--in this dream, she didn't shut it off before throwing it. Red to white to blue, green and purple and orange, a rainbow of possibilities as it lands in his hand, as he slashes through the guard holding him and pushes the remains away.

Here's where it changes.

Unlike what actually happened, he spares no glance for the throne, for the dead decrepit thing on the floor. He rushes to her, and says nothing about old things dying, nothing about new orders. Instead, his mouth finds hers, and his lips shape living things instead of talking of death.

It's only when he pulls away, when he meets her wide, warm eyes, that he realizes she is dreaming, too. 

The thought is a jolt, shivering the air around them, making the dream-constructed throne room into...something else. Something warm and dark, a place between stars, something that contains only them. They are still sleeping, but also awake, and the thrum of the bond is deafening in his ears. 

He should be embarrassed. He should be trying to sever this, to escape with some shred of his dignity intact. But all he can think of is how she didn't pull away, how her mouth sought his and her hands came up to tangle in his sweaty hair.

"You aren't nothing," he murmurs to her, forehead bent to press against hers. "You're everything."

"Why did you do that?" She whispers into the galaxies between them. "You told me I was nothing, you told me to abandon everything. That was so _stupid_ , Ben."

He pulls in a shuddering breath. "Yeah. I know." He does. That night...the _space_ in his head, the emptiness that the dark, screaming thing left behind when he cut Snoke in half. All he could remember was a feeling like falling, like flailing against the void of space, and needing something to hold on to. Some cause to cling to, and none of these causes had ever wanted him. He'd wanted to raze it all to the ground, to leave it in flames, and Rey. He always wanted Rey.

"You can still fix it." Her murmur is barely words at all, just a breath above silence. Her eyes are closed, her forehead pressed to his with bruising intensity. "You can come home."

 _Come home to me._ That part she doesn't say out loud, but he hears it clear as a clarion call. 

"And what then, Rey?" His voice is harsh in his throat, raw as if he'd been screaming. Distantly, he wonders if he's talking in his sleep, if someone can hear him. "Hux takes over? I'm welcomed into the Resistance fold? They'd kill me. And they'd be right to."

Her hands tighten on his, eyes snapping open. Her mouth is set in that tight line that says she doesn't like what she's hearing, and that she's deciding if she'll pretend she didn't hear it. "I'll protect you."

"The Resistance's only Jedi will protect the former Supreme Leader, war criminal? That will end well."

Her grip on his hands is starting to hurt, and he welcomes it. Welcomes her anger. "So what's your plan, then? Stay Supreme Leader?" She throws his hands away from her, steps back, gestures wildly to the dark void of their bond. "Make sure that _this_ is all we can ever have?"

She'd never speak so plainly anywhere other than a dream, even in other moments of Force connection. There's an openness to her face that Ben knows he's been the only other person to see, naked longing in her gaze. His stomach twists, drops. 

"Do you want more?" He breathes.

Her lips twist, hands falling to her sides. Her lip makes its way between her teeth. She doesn't answer. 

Ben steps forward, his hand rising slowly to cup her cheek. She leans into it, eyes closing with a broken sigh. In the dream, he's not wearing his gloves, and his bare thumb obscures the tear tracks on her face. He doesn't kiss her again, but his face comes toward hers, their breaths synchronizing. It's like meditating together, here in the Force, and he wonders for a moment about all the pathways they could have taken, the lives they could have lived that might have made that a thing they would do. Sitting in a cave, after training, meditating. 

No. Couldn't do that. Because the Jedi were forbidden to form attachments and fall in love, and he didn't think there was any lifetime he could live where the sight of Rey wouldn't light him up like a solar flare.

Neither one of them speaks, and eventually the dream fades away. The Force connection stays for a moment longer, through his white-knuckled effort, and Ben finds himself in her bed. He raises a hand to card his fingers through her hair, and she shifts toward him, eyes still wet. 

He kisses her on the forehead, the first contact his lips have had with her skin somewhere that wasn't a dream or a strange Force-void. Then he fades away.

He stares up into his ceiling for a long time before he falls back asleep.


	8. research

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben does some reading.
> 
> song rec:
> 
> Currents--Dashboard Confessional

_A Force bond, once severed, does not heal. Instead, it leaves behind something like a mental wound..._

"What's that?"

Ben powers down the holopad with a practiced swish of his finger, the scanned-in image of the ancient text collapsing into nothing. 

Rey's eyes are hard and accusing as she repeats her question. "Ben. What _was_ that?"

He sighs, running a nervous hand through his hair. It's the middle of the night, and he thought she'd be sleeping. He hadn't considered the possibility their connection might spark at the moment he read about severing it, as if it felt betrayed and was defending itself. 

He steels his spine before turning to face her, trying to make his face stony. He's shirtless, prepared for sleep that never came, but she isn't flustered by it like she once had been. Rey crosses her arms, frown deepening, and the mask he's made of his face breaks. 

"You don't deserve this," he says quietly. "The secrecy, your mind shackled to mine--"

"If you're _this_ embarrassed about that dream--"

"It makes me better," he says without thinking, cutting her off. "It makes you worse."

She stops, mouth working around something to say that never comes out. She draws her knees up to her chest, looping her arms around them, and Ben sags in his chair. It was true, but it still felt like wrenching out an organ to say it, to give words to the thing he's thought from the beginning. She didn't deserve to be shackled to him, to have her shine dulled by his darkness. He takes a deep breath, tries to hide the way it hitches on the end. 

"It doesn't make me worse," she says, her words so quiet he has to strain to hear them even in the silence of the Force bond. "It makes me..." she trails off, fiddling with the loose hair around her shoulders. She's taken to wearing it all down, now. Her eyes rise to meet his, the motion clearly taking effort. He swallows. 

"You know," Rey murmurs, "how when people expect you to be something, that's what you become?"

Ben swallows. Nods. He knows that all too well. 

"No one expected anything of me, until recently," Rey continues. "I was all alone, on Jakku. No one cared."

His fists tighten at the mention of her kriffing terrible family, oblique as it is. The thought that the woman in front of him could be so easily discounted, cast aside like she was nothing, is still enough to make ire blaze in his chest, And shame that he'd used the words, too, even if it was borne out of shock that someone could see her that way. 

"But I put expectations on myself," she continues quietly. "If I was... _good_ , if I was patient and kind, they'd come back. I just had to be good enough." She shrugs. "Not all bad, I guess. Good qualities to have. But still, expectations."

"And here," she says, waving absently in the air to indicate the Resistance. "Here, I'm hope. I'm...light."

"You're the last Jedi," Ben says with a snort. He means it as a quip, but it sounds hollow, even to him.

Rey looks at him, something unreadable in her eyes. She rises from her bed, walking over to him across galaxies. Ben's pulse pounds. 

" _This_ ," Rey says, poking him hard in the shoulder, "doesn't expect anything of me. _You_ don't expect anything of me, except for me to just...be." Her fists clench by her sides, and Rey's face lowers to his, sudden fury burning in her hazel eyes. "And you don't get to decide when it ends, Ben Solo. Don't you fucking dare."

The connection blinks out right then, her furious mouth only inches from his, her harsh breath fading from his throat after the image of her is gone. Ben stares into the dark void she's left, breathing hard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO. Full disclosure, I have no idea if any ancient texts dealing with Force bonds would be out in the galaxy for Ben to study. The idea isn't new (Revan and Bastila had one), so I assume there would be some reports somewhere. I mostly just wanted to explore the idea of Ben being the one who wanted to sever the bond, and why he might want that.


	9. coup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> song rec:
> 
> heavy in your arms -- florence and the machine

The first thing she notices is pain. 

It's not hers. It's distant... _thin_ , almost, as if she's feeling only a sliver of something, a splinter of ice off a glacier. Still, it doubles her over, her legs swinging over the side of her bed, the muscles in her legs seizing and cramping as the pain spiderwebs through her torso.

Rey clenches her teeth around a scream against both the feeling and the realization of what it is. Electrostaff, applied to an already-existing bowcaster wound. 

_Ben._

Their minds hadn't connected in one standard week, since that night she found him reading, trying to learn how to sever the bond. Cold crept up her spine sometimes, sure he'd found a way, and that was why he hadn't appeared to annoy her while she tried to meditate or showed up with his head on her pillow. Every time, she assured herself she would _know_. She would know if he'd cut his mind off from her, if he'd severed that shining thing that kept them connected through lightyears and galaxies. The holobook he was reading called it a wound -- that meant she'd feel it, right? He was a comfortable presence just outside of her head, she'd know if he was gone.

Another spike of pain shoots through her side, her fingers arching into tortured shapes. This time, she can't quite stop the cry, and it wrenches out of her throat and around her teeth, low and feral. 

_Ben_. She's never been able to make the bond connect before, never been able to bend it to her will, but now she flings his name out into the void of space, the darkness of her head, routing out every corner where he might be hiding. The Force is a crackle in her nerve endings, lightning in her fingers, arcing across space to answer to her command.

The bridging of their minds is usually a gradual thing, a fading in. This is a crash, a solar flare, and the Supreme Leader is on his knees on the floor next to her tiny cot, his full mouth a rictus of pain, pretty eyes squeezed shut. She can't see anything else, only him, but there's the impression of a blue flash at his side and Ben roars, jaw opening like it's been unhinged.

"Ben." She doesn't care that it's the middle of the night, that the entire base will hear her, that Finn and Rose's room is right next door and the walls are thin. " _Ben_!"

His eyes open, a haze of pain and confusion, and his head turns to her slowly as if he's dreaming. When he sees her, his eyes widen, and he shakes his head desperately, wordlessly pleading with her to run even though she's lightyears away.

"Worthless sorceror." The blue light again, and Ben's jaw clenches, his dark head dropping almost too the floor. He's shirtless, hair tousled, clearly roused from sleep. The bowcaster scar is red and angry, stretching crimson fingers up his torso like veins. "No power now, apparently. Just a bit of pain is all it is to make you weak?"

Rey knows that's not true, remembers a gloved fist beating against a still-bleeding side in the snowy forest on Takodana. As if her memory sparks his own, Ben's eyes raise, mouth changing shape from prey to predator in an instant. He doesn't speak, but she sees his fingers move and hears a choked noise. 

But then Ben's hands are wrenched behind him, his head yanked back like there's a hand in his hair. His eyes dart to her, wide and frightened, and then his head whips to the side with a _crack_ and she's alone in her room again, head ringing, side aching.

"Shit." Rey pants into the emptiness of her room, her feet skidding on the floor as she stands to pace, restless energy given no outlet. The posts of her cot shake and she clenches her hands, trying to drown out the spark of Force that once cracked a solid rock and made a Jedi Master fear her. "Shit."

Hux. It had to be. She'd always known, somehow, that the First Order's General would try something, would try to bring Ben down. Ben knew, too, but still he goaded, still he pushed...and hadn't she almost _wanted_ that? Almost wanted something to happen that forced him back to her, forced him to leave, forced that ridiculous crown and loathsome title onto someone else?

She hadn't considered that he might die for it. Rey was still an idealist after all this time, still believed in inherent goodness even after a childhood full of sand had tried to scourge it from her soul. She wanted Ben back, didn't want to lose him to Kylo Ren, but they were one and the same and to lose one was to lose the other. 

She couldn't lose either.

Finn and Rose appear at her door, Finn's friendly eyes drooping with sleep, Rose's hair a dark tangle around her head. "Rey?" She steps forward, face open and curious, lays a hand on Rey's arm to stop her pacing. "We heard you scream."

Finn's brow raises. "Who's Ben?"

It could all come pouring out. All of it could be laid bare, here. But Rey doesn't have the time for that, even as the words leap to her tongue, even as her mind longs to unburden itself. 

She squeezes Rose's hand before striding out the door, barely remembering to grab pants and pull them on beneath her tunic. "We need...there's been..."

They look at her, expectant, worried. Rey closes her eyes.

"There's been a coup," she says quietly. "And I need a ship."


End file.
